Thanksgiving week already?! I have to admit, I’m going to have a rather quiet holiday this year. One of my cats, Mistoffelees, took ill last week, and in order to give him his meds and check his bladder to make sure it’s not blocked (he has a urinary tract infection and could die from it if I don’t watch him carefully) I canceled my plans to drive to Richmond and spend the holiday with family. The poet is also out-of-town, visiting his sister and godparents in Amherst (what a picture-perfect town for Thanksgiving!), and most of my friends are MIA, so I’m going to spend a quiet week in my apartment pretending to write papers and eating only the food in my fridge and pantry. I’m thankful for this time to work, though. I need it. Why I convinced myself that writing a thesis was a good plan…someone should have stopped me! **If anyone has any good movie suggestions, please let me know!** I’m going to rent some from the university library to watch at night!

On Sunday I cooked a mini-Thanksgiving meal for my mom and the poet. At the local farmers market last week, I picked up a bag of broccoli greens for $3. The farmer convinced me that they were sweeter than collards, but that you cook them the same way. After deribing the leaves and ripping them into bite sized pieces, I sauteed them with olive oil and garlic for a few minutes, then added water to the pan, covered it with a lid, and let them simmer for 30 minutes until tender. They were amazing! Frankly, they tasted just like broccoli. Only leafy. I didn’t have my camera with me, so no pictures, but I’m hoping to get some in my Vegetable Husband box soon (fingers crossed)! Thanks for recommending it Leigh, I can’t wait to get my first box!

Shelly, over at Musings from the Fishbowl, introduced this great exchange idea called Pay It Forward. I’m stoked to participate, but you get to as well! I will send 3 of you who comment a handmade gift (it’s true, I can be crafty, who knew!) within the next 365 days. Don’t worry about where you live because I’m willing to ship internationally. On Monday, Dec. 1, I will pick three people using a random number generator so that it’s fair.

The catch is that you have to be willing to do it too! If I pick you, then you have to commit to sending three people a handmade gift in the next 365 days. You know, pay it forward! Be sure to specify in your comment that you want to participate–I don’t want to rope you into a commitment you can’t keep!

I hope you all have a lovely Thanksgiving and safe travels if you’re on the road or flying somewhere!

Remember how I said I bought a ton of roastable veggies–and then realized that I’d actually have to roast them? One of the veggies I had on hand was a fairly large head of cauliflower. A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I used to be a bit more bike punkish than I am now and I’d travel all over for alley cats (illegal drunken fixed gear bicycle races through the streets of NYC or Philly–that kind of bike punkness). Part of that fixation (pun intended) was browsing through city-specific message boards. NYC FixedGear was (and still is) one of my faves, if only for the variety and hilariousness of posts. One of the longer ones is vegan food, and someone threw out the idea of fettucine alfredo a la cauliflower. Being too lazy to sift through pages and pages of posts on the message board, I vaguely remembered Susan posting a no-fredo recipe and crossed my fingers in hope that it involved cauliflower. Badabing, it did!

Although I trust Susan’s recipes and I think they’re the bomb, I don’t think I would have believed in it if it weren’t for the bike connection. The bike community, as a whole, tends to be very pro-vegan or anti-vegan (baconites) and to see vegan and non-vegan bike kids (if you can call 30-something-year-olds “kids”) agreeing on the awesomeness of no-fredo via cauliflower convinced me of its power. That and the relative ease of boiling cauliflower versus roasting it. The end result was amazing–the poet says it tastes like real alfredo! It’s not quite as creamy as I remember alfredo being, but it is pretty darn good. Due to the size of my cauliflower, I’ve frozen a container of the no-fredo and I’ll pull it out again in a week or two and finish it off.

Using the lesser amounts of each seasoning, place all the sauce ingredients except nutritional yeast into a large saucepan and cook, covered, until the cauliflower is very soft, about 15 minutes. When it’s completely tender, use a blender/food processor to puree the cauliflower to a smooth sauce.

Check the seasoning of the sauce, and add more to taste; add the nutritional yeast. Allow the sauce to simmer and thicken while you prepare the mushrooms and pasta.

Bring a pot of water to boil and cook the pasta until done.

Sauté the kale, carrots, mushrooms, and garlic in olive oil until tender. I steamed the vegetables for a few minutes after I sautéed them in order to get the kale tender. When finished cooking, set aside.

Combine the pasta, vegetables, and some sauce together in a suace pan and cook for 1-3 minutes until the vegetables and pasta are well coated. Serve!

Waking up in one’s own bed after an amazing weekend of drinks, hot tubs, great conversations, the roaring surf, and good good good food is never fun. The weather was perfect (in my opinion): one night rainy, the next day foggy, the next day sunny and the temperature hovered in the mid-sixties during the day (and was deliciously cooler at night). At one point, the poet and I walked out into the fog on the beach at night and the tide was so far out that we didn’t find the waves before we’d lost all sight of the house and its lights. Uber creepy. But great fun!

One of the things I don’t like so much about Fripp Island, SC is that the houses were built on top of the dunes, so development killed the island. The rate of erosion is scary fast, as you can see by the waves meeting the houses tucked behind a seawall (a jetty is farther to the right of the frame). Jetties and seawalls actually speed up the rate of erosion, and farther down the beach, where dunes (albeit tiny dunes) exist, the water comes right up and washes them away. Picturesque, but deadly.

Luckily, I found some life on the beach! A few sanddollars were brown and kicking, so I scooped them up and put them back in the water, and I also found a little conch that begged me to be tossed back. Too many horseshoe crabs were washed up though…which is disturbing because they were all adolescents. But maybe that was just because of the storms. Who knows.

As for a food wrap-up, I prepared most of the food before I left. Thankfully, vegan food doesn’t spoil after a few hours in a cooler, so all of it survived.

Pardon the lack of posts with more than a picture as of late. I’ve been a bit stressed out with deadlines (as always, it seems), but I have been cooking! I’m working on catching up on everyone’s posts, never fear!

When I went to the Farmer’s Market last time I bought a bunch of wintery veggies to roast: butternut squash, acorn squash, a sugar pumpkin, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, etc. The part I didn’t think about was how much time roasting requires, and being a student, I’m always a bit crunched on time. The wait is always worth it though.

When I saw Jessy’s recipe for stuffed acorn squash, I knew I had to try it. I had bought one acorn squash to try, since I’d never had it before, and I already had kale and cooked quinoa on hand–voila, one stuffed squash! I was pleasantly surprised with the flavor–I’ve only tried butternut and pumpkin before–and the walnuts added depth of flavor. Thanks for the idea/recipe Jessy!

Stuffed Acorn Squash

Cut the acorn squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Place it face down in a baking pan filled with 1/4 inch of water. Bake the squash at 350 for about 30-40 minutes (or until tender). Remove the squash from the oven and allow it to cool.

While the squash is roasting, saute the kale in a olive oil on medium-high heat for 2 minutes. Sprinkle 1 tbsp water into the pan and cover with a lid to steam. Steam for 2 more minutes (or until tender). Remove from heat.

Once the squash halves have cooled, scoop out the squash, leaveing about 1/4 inch on the edges. Place the squash flesh in a mixing bowl and mash with a fork. Add the kale, walnuts, maple syrup, and quinoa– combine well.

Scoop the stuffing into the empty squash halves and bake for 10 minutes at 350. Remove from heat, allow to cool for a few minutes, and enjoy!